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This is what I found in a big German newspaper (KÃƒÂ¶lner Stadtanzeiger, 26 May 2010):

A medical team round Prof. Dr. Mallmann of Cologne University Hospital cooperating with Harvard University has developed a new therapy for preeclampsia and tested it succesfully on a pregnant woman after diagnosis of preeclampsia in her 28th week of gestation. The team managed to prolong pregnancy for two further weeks by filtering out protein sFlt1 out of the patient's blood by hemodialysis. This has been the second time ever, that this therapy has been applied.

The doctors at Cologne University Hospital are very optimistic, that they are advancing towards an efficient therapy against preeclampsia for the first time.

Best regards

Lilith

DD born at 25+3 weeks and died 3 days later due to severe preeclampsia
DS born at 33+6 weeks due to severe preeclampsia

This is precisely where a lot of the ongoing research is looking for a bench-to-bedside therapy -- right at the soluble factors like sFlt-1. What we want is something safe for the mother that allows pregnancy to be prolonged for at least 48 hours, to get the steroid shots on board.

I don't know if you could request it yet. Any human therapy has to go through a sufficiently controlled human trial to show that it doesn't introduce harms before you can introduce it as standard of care -- and there's not supposed to be any adoption of therapies until those trials are completed. If this study meets those criteria then it will make it through hospital IRBs and be adopted as the new standard of care.

That sounds like I'm being a stickler for rules when babies are dying. But. An awful lot of docs recommended and people adopted, in an uncontrolled experimental fashion, antioxidant therapies, on the grounds that they couldn't hurt and might help, based on some small studies. And then the big studies showed that actually, they *could* hurt. Mostly this disease is just so counterintuitive that docs have gotten a lot more cautious. The HYPITAT study one of the only ones where I'd expect printing it out to potentially change an individual practice, and that's because induction at term for maternal indicators is already an accepted practice, if that makes sense.

It says in this article that the concentration of sFlt-1 can be used as an indicator for the likelihood of PE in a pregnant woman and of the severity of PE. Is this an medical/statistical assumption or is this already been established? If so, why aren't all pregnant women tested on their levels of sFlt-1? This should become standard.

It would be great if it were that simple to filter out the sFlt-1 as a method to prolong a PE pregnancy.

I will print out this article for future reference.

Nothing else in this article stuck out that we don't know. Just some general information on PE and of how great the cooperation was and so forth and so on. No further details on the method itself unfortunately.

I dug around in the internet and could not find any more details other than the same article being published everywhere! I have checked the German forums and somebody mentioned that she actually was tested in Koeln.Perhaps she is willing to share her results. Will try to figure out more. This is rather interesting.